10. My Reflections
My mind would also begin to strongly resist from within as soon as I would start reflecting on the meanings of our living on this planet.
As soon as I started to sense ever deeper that while alone communing with God of Israel, the Father of Israel, in my own words, I would begin to feel some peace and tranquility within me, I got engaged in my reflections to the effect that I did not follow the rituals prescribed by the rabbis and scribes. Yet all the same, I did experience peace within me. It means that a ritual does not give one anything. It does not, by itself, replace a living bond with God. It is not enough to perform a ritual to feel a living relationship with God. It is the ritual that impedes man’s live association since in that case man’s attention is directed to the performance of the ritual rather than to the very relationship of man’s inner self with God.
My personal experience, as far back as in my adolescent years, convinced me that it was not the ritual that was important to God the Father but man’s communion with Him out of heart. I would hint about it to my parents. However, because of such speculations of mine, they both got frightened, so much, that right away they would resort to talking me out of those, unfamiliar to them, forms of communion with God. And each time they would emphasize to me that their Scriptures were so old that many generations had lived abiding by them, rabbis and scribes knew them very well, and they always did teach to pray to God by the set forms of prayers. The same things were also taught in synagogues. Therefore, they would get very irritated by my conversations and I had nothing to do but, again, to keep everything within myself. I could find a common language with nobody the moment I started saying that God loved all.
There cannot be such a God who would love some more, while He would hurt others. In that case He must be a very ruthless God for even a good gentile is worthy of both love and similar treatment to a Jew. However, such speculations of mine might only scare my friends and teachers at the synagogue school. Thus, from my very childhood I perceived well that even well-intended conversations did not always lead to benevolence on the part of the children, even of my age, if they could not understand my words while being unable to escape from their own concepts. Therefore, during all my life, I had no one to talk with frankly about the things in man’s life that both moved and anguished me.
Therefore, the questions did strike my mind ever more often as to why others did not notice such obvious things that I could see so clearly? Why do others take everything for granted rather than think about the deeper causes? Why cannot they realize that this type of living is leading people to even greater alienation and division, and even to a greater suffering? Why do I see much deeper than my friends? Do I even understand many things that even rabbis and scribes are unable to understand? Such questions were permanently tickling my mind but I did not find the answers that would be obvious and clear to me.
